vSphere 6.5 is on the market for quite a bit of time. In most cases, customers don’t perform upgrade immediately after the release of new software. It was the same with my home lab. I wanted to take a holistic approach and perform an upgrade to the latest and greatest release of all products I have in my home lab. In this first post, I will show you upgrade process of all components I use.

VMware is aware how many products relies on every solution as well how complex environments can be. VMware KB https://kb.vmware.com/kb/2147289 will be used as a basis for our upgrade procedure.

In my lab I have following components:

vCenter Server 6.0 Update 2

ESXi 6.0 Update 2

NSX 6.2.4

vRealize Log Insight 3.6

vRealize Operations Manager 6.2.1

As I am running vCenter Server 6.0 U2 with embedded PSC on Windows Server it will be the last step in KB sequence to migrate existing Windows vCenter to vCenter Server Appliance. Without further due let’s do it!

Prerequisites

One of the prerequisites is to have vSwitch with a network configured on desired ESXi host. The second prerequisite is to execute VMware-Migration-Assitant.exe which prepares your vCenter Server to vCenter Server Appliance migration.

Choose data to migrate. You can select: Configuration; Configuration, events and tasks or Configuration, events, tasks and performance metrics.

If you wish you could join Vmware Customer Improvement Service (CEIP).

On the last screen we see the summary of our upgrade/migration to vCenter Server Appliance.

Click OK to contiune.

Migration process will start.

Migration of Windows vCenter Server 6.* is finished and we have shiny vCenter Server Appliance 6.5 ready to use.

New shiny interface is presented to us after logging in.

Summary

Its been a while since I got my hands on new VMware products, but I am pretty impressed with vSphere 6.5 release. vSphere 6.5 is mature release and especially after first updates it can be rolled out in to the production environments.

I am innovative and experienced IT professional with over 12 years in the IT industry.

My experience and skills have been proven by leading vendor certifications like AWS, Alibaba Cloud, VMware, and Microsoft. I contribute to IT community and I received VMware vExpert 2014 - 2017 and VMware vExpert NSX 2017 Award.